Allotment update – 1/8/2025

A month ago I had just taken on another half plot, cleared a section of it and sown seeds of carrots, beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions and lettuce. All but the lettuce germinated, mostly within a week to ten days. Emergence was a little patchy and in the weeks since the rows have become even more patchy so presumably something is eating the seedlings, probably slugs and snails, in spite of how dry it has been. Weeds are rife, mostly seedling grass, I need to hoe.

To the rows of seeds I have added a row of cabbage plants, which were initially uncovered, allowing pigeons to shred them somewhat. They are now covered in mesh. I have sown radish, which is up and being hit hard by flea beetle, and I have planted cell grown lettuce, beetroot and spring onions.

I cleared another few yards of the plot and sowed runner beans, less with a view to getting a crop than because I had spare seed and thought it would act as an effective nitrogen fixing, biomass producing cover crop. I don’t plan to support them, they can sprawl on the ground and when the frost gets them I will cut them, shred them and spread them back in the same place.

In the cleared space still available I intend planting strawberries from the runners in my existing strawberry bed. They just need to get a bit more root on them before I transplant them.

I have covered the next section with a layer of strawy manure topped with lots of my garden and allotment shreddings. Hopefully the topping will kill most of the underlying weed leaving me with an easy job to get it ready for early crops next spring.

It is interesting, if a little depressing, to take over a piece of land right alongside the piece I already have and find that the soil is so degraded. It validates what I have tried to do on my plot with no dig and more. I regard soil maintenance as inseparable from growing crops, an all year round ongoing process, not something covered by a once a year dig over with the incorporation of compost or manure. Growing plants, whether an edible crop or a green manure/cover crop, are capturing the energy of the sun to support biological activity in the soil and that biological activity will do a better job of maintaining soil fertility and condition than any intervention I can make.

On my existing plot there is almost no bare soil showing anywhere. I have taken the tops off early potato ‘Kestrel’ as blight was taking hold. I’m digging the potatoes as I need them. My row of maincrop potatoes is almost completely blight free. I am growing a ‘Sharpo Mira’ x ‘Valor’ variety called ‘Java’ and am impressed by the level of blight resistance. It remains to be seen what sort of crop I have and what they taste like. I’m hoping to get lots of good sized spuds to use as bakers through the winter months.

My rows of ‘Hurst Greenshaft’ peas are dying off and drying out. I have left them for now in order to harvest seed for next year. Peas are self fertile so should come true to type and I will pick the biggest pods in the hope that will give me a better crop next year. I direct sowed some tall ‘Alderman’ peas in late May, was pleasantly surprised by how little interested the slugs were and have had a couple of pickings from them in the last week. Like runner beans, anything uneaten is nutrient rich green manure and/or next season’s seed stock.

Sweet Corn is a crop that I usually get perhaps 60-75% germination from around 50 seeds in a packet. This year all but one germinated and almost all made decent plants, so I will have far more than we can eat. I’m not remotely bothered, anything uneaten gets shredded along with the rest of the plant and spread back where it was growing. Then I will likely sow a cover crop to further protect the soil and hold on to the accumulated nutrients through the winter. I am growing the variety ‘Goldcrest’.

I planted assorted brassicas late in order to avoid cabbage root fly, a strategy that seems to have worked almost 100%. I have lost none but there are a couple of plants looking pretty feeble. They may recover. Large and small cabbage whites and diamond back moth have been piling in and I have gone along the rows searching out eggs and larvae of all of them. Hopefully I have been successful enough to get a crop.

My onions have once again done well. I have grown them from seed not sets for a few years now and always panic slightly mid season when I see how much further on everyone else set grown plants are. Then theirs stop growing and mine catch up. I planted them more closely spaced than I usually do, not wanting especially big bulbs; it hasn’t really worked, they’re still a very good size.

We’re still eating blueberries. I picked the first berry on 13th June, the day before Sue and family headed to London. The crop will just carry over into August, which is pretty impressive. I think I have around five varieties but I don’t know what most of them are. This year’s crop was almost too heavy, leading to the berries being smaller than usual; the dry weather won’t have helped either. We don’t keep them, not having found them very good for jam making or freezing, so our neighbours have been called upon to help us out, a task they’ve taken on without complaint.

In the tunnel I have ‘Sungold’ and ‘Akron’ tomatoes. I paid £3.20 for 10 seeds of ‘Sungold’, which is still good value given the crop they yield. However, next year I will take two stems up from each plant, potentially doubling my yield, an idea from a YouTube channel called GrowVeg which I just came across. ‘Akron’ is an absurdly heavy cropper; I had to double up the support strings after one broke. The plan is to freeze or bottle a lot of them for soups and sauces in winter. They are growing in the ground and some of the ‘Akron’ have become virus infected, albeit with minimal effect on the crop, and there is some botrytis too.

I have been growing lettuce in the tunnel and outside and mainly using the tunnel crop which is cleaner and has less slug damage. I will soon need to get winter salads such as mustard, lettuce, mizuna and rocket sown. I must check when I sowed them last year, they did very well.

That’s most of what is happening now, check in again in a month’s time for the next snapshot.